If you are responsible for B2B lead generation, you probably have a hungry sales team to feed. But do you know how many leads you will need to meet sales targets? If you don’t know, you’re less likely to hit your goals.

Try putting together a basic plan to tie your marketing campaigns to sales objectives. By using a few simple calculations you can better understand:

The # of impressions you’ll need

The number of leads you need

Whether or not your are on track to hit your goals

Here’s how: First, calculate the number of customers you’ll need to generate.

In addition to its announcement that it will include Twitter streams in its search results, Google announced its release of real-time streaming search. Will this be an area of the search results pages ripe with spam? Or will this be the next step to integrating information, time & location in relevant context? Either way, it highlights the need for businesses to incorporate social media and a steady stream of content into their inbound marketing strategies. Google provides a short video demo of this capability below:

If you generate leads for a sales team, you are familiar with the common debate of quality vs. quantity. The B2B lead generation marketer has traditionally been graded on quantity, while sales counterparts are typically graded (and compensated) on closed sales. So is it possible to generate too many leads? Well the answer is...it depends (of course).

It depends on a lot of factors but the biggest issue is your lead management system. In other words, how many leads can you follow up with and how much will it costs to follow up with them?

If sales has to follow up personally with every single lead, then there is a very real limit to how many leads you can generate without wastage. At some point, leads will start to get dropped or missed and that isn't good for anybody. However, on the flip side, if you have a well designed automated lead management system in place, the process is much more scalable. In fact, if you are using automated follow up in conjunction with lead intelligence, not only will you close more leads, there may not be a limit to how many leads you can generate.

So remember to keep fulfillment and follow up in mind when planning any of your lead generation campaigns.